Posted
by
BeauHDon Wednesday March 16, 2016 @02:57PM
from the flavors-of-competition dept.

szczys writes: We are surely in the age of single-board computers as the words "Raspberry Pi" sneak into the ranks of [a] household name. Many would have thought this impossible, but for hardware enthusiasts it has wide-reaching benefits as others clamor to enter the market. The most formidable challenge made so far is by the Hardkernel Odroid C2 which bests the Pi 3 on hardware, but not everything. Odroid C2 has the same cores, running faster with more RAM. It swaps out gigabit Ethernet for the Pi 3's somewhat unimpressive Wi-Fi chip. And it includes onboard eMMC (useful for faster booting) as well as an SD card slot. Odroid C2's hardware is clearly a better offering than Pi 3 for just $5 more (as we saw from the benchmarks last week), but that's not the entire story. It's further down Linux stream for a less mature distro, and has nowhere near the community support that has opened the Pi [up] to just about everyone. But it is the hardware geek's SBC with the layman's price tag and that's a very interesting indicator of where we are with low-cost computing.

So when are any of these SBC makers going to set up an educational foundation, and start supporting their stuff for use by educators and students in the 8-17 age bracket?

They're just tapping into the market of 18-60 year olds who buy shitty SBCs for embedded home projects? Raspberry Pi doesn't have anything to worry about. In fact, they can better focus on their project goals if crap-board vendors tap off and remove that secondary customer group from their product.

WinCE could do it but unless you are planning to only run a single application it's a pain. I've got a handy little WinCE box that runs as an X terminal (how weird is that) and it works well. I've got an ebook reader running WinCE that does not work well since it's a situation where multi-tasking would be nice (yes I know WinCE has been shown to multi-task in rigged toy demos but it doesn't get used in the wild) and it's sloooow handing over from the launcher application to the ereader functions.There are

It's not off-topic at all, the main debate about C2 vs Pi3 is about price vs hardware. And it's not trolling if it's true. The entry-level Mac mini, given the hardware specifications, should cost at least 40% less.

It's not a multiuser system, and it's highly unlikely someone could damage it remotely. Even if it happened, there's nothing of much importance in it (it's mostly a secondary dns, mx, and xmpp server). Userland libs and services are kept up-to-date and restarted as needed, though.

Even disregarding the community aspect, Odroid runs a weirdo/old software stack. If it was running something more akin to Raspbian which is pretty close to mainline Debian, i would be more interested in it. I dont even like using Adafruit's custom raspbian images they provide with their ~3" TFT screens.

For Insignal and Hardkernel's Exynos-based Android projects, their poor software support (vastly outdated software baselines - no excuse for development reference boards to have older software than carrier-approved Android handset releases for the same SoC, software baselines which were vasty different from any shipped product containing SoC, and Hardkernel's distribution of their Android source as a 2GB megatarball with no commit history - I hear they might hav

Even disregarding the community aspect, Odroid runs a weirdo/old software stack.

Ubuntu 16.04 is "weirdo/old"?

The reason I'd avoid it is because I' m trying to use one of their XU4s to run a GigE camera, and under Ubuntu 15.4 it appears to have issues handling jumbo frames. That's a bit better than what happens using the official Hardkernel Ubuntu 15.10 -- the GigE controller (connected through the USB, as is done on the Pi) disconnects about ten seconds after being initialized. I.e., it simply disappears. And I can't get an answer from Hardkernel about any fixes they plan for this.

Um, how else do you expect them to do it? Ubuntu cannot support every possible board out there. ARM-hardware is a wild, wild west and not nearly as standardized as x86, with nearly each and every board requiring u-boot specifically built for that specific board -- there is no generic build that you can distribute that'd work on even a fraction of all of them.

Um, how else do you expect them to do it? Ubuntu cannot support every possible board out there. ARM-hardware is a wild, wild west and not nearly as standardized as x86, with nearly each and every board requiring u-boot specifically built for that specific board -- there is no generic build that you can distribute that'd work on even a fraction of all of them.

The problem is not the customization. it's the lack of support. Basically th

I do not disagree about the support, I disagree with the anon's post. As I said in the other Odroid C2-advertisement that was just recently posted here, RPi seems like it has the most longevity of the various ARM SBCs for now -- it even has a FOSS GPU-driver now (a work-in-progress, but nevertheless), capable of full OpenGL instead of just GLES, and that's not something any of the other boards can claim.

If one was looking for SBCs I'd recommend the RPi over the others, even if it has worse specs, simply bec

Even disregarding the community aspect, Odroid runs a weirdo/old software stack.

Ubuntu 16.04 is "weirdo/old"?

You are talking about the top of the software stack. He was talking about the bottom of the software stack - the firmware/binary blobs and the non-mainstream kernel drivers that you need to run on the odroid.

The reason I'd avoid it is because I' m trying to use one of their XU4s to run a GigE camera, and under Ubuntu 15.4 it appears to have issues handling jumbo frames...

Like he said - "weird/old software stack". It sounds like Hardkernel are doing hacks in the kernel source to get things partly working, but contributing them back to the mainline kernel (which is where QA happens in the linux world).

The draw of Odroid is running android. It works pretty well on their hardware. It's still a "weirdo" stack but it's hands down bang for buck for running android. If you want Linux then yeah, raspberry pi is probably what you want.

I had an odroid C1. Though it has nice specs, the software is incredibly flaky. I would routinely get software updates from hard kernel that would corrupt the boot loader, disable networking, etc. There was a period where they shipped a wifi driver for their *own* branded wifi adapter that could not reliably connect to name brand access points if there were more than a few visible to the device. When I complained that hard kernel was routinely hosing my productivity for pushing untested software into it

How is swapping out wifi with no add-on board (PI 3) for a wired interface an improvement?? For $5 extra?

The Odroid is GIGABIT ethernet, sparky. The Pi isn't even really a fully capable 100 Mb. It is hanging off the same terrible chip that implements the USBs. At least that's the promise of the Odroid. The Odroid hardware QC is so shaky, however, I've avoided trying it so far.

Considering the power of the hardware I don't see much of a bottle neck with the Pi. Gig ethernet would probably not be that noticeable on that platform. Speed isn't really it's thing. It's just fast enough. Just.

I have the slightly older Odroid C1, which competes against the PI2. Gigabit is definitely noticeable, and it quite happily saturates the Gigabit link well before saturating the CPU. It performs well enough that I can use the Odroid as low cost, low power file server.

Ok, probably most users care more about the general-purpose ARM cores and Linux than the VideoCore, but it's just wrong to say that ODroid "has the same cores but faster", when the biggest portion of BCM2837, the VideoCore, is completely absent from the ODroid.

Interesting to know, as I am one of said users, and as a this actually makes me more likely to consider an ODroid C2.

RPi is a video capture/processing chip (Broadcom VideoCore) with an ARM co-processor. Compresses, manipulates, and streams Full HD input video in real-time.

ODroid has no video input at all (the product page suggests getting a USB camera which performs its own compression, because the ODroid could never keep up)

Ok, probably most users care more about the general-purpose ARM cores and Linux than the VideoCore, but it's just wrong to say that ODroid "has the same cores but faster", when the biggest portion of BCM2837, the VideoCore, is completely absent from the ODroid.

Incorrect. The Odroid-C2 uses the Amlogic S905 SoC which does have a built-in encoding/decoding block. It supports much higher resolutions and framerates than RPi, including formats the RPi's Videocore IV doesn't support at all; Videocore IV doesn't support e.g. HEVC, let alone 10-bit HEVC, whereas the S905 does do both.

RPi is a video capture/processing chip (Broadcom VideoCore) with an ARM co-processor. Compresses, manipulates, and streams Full HD input video in real-time.

As opposed to 4K video at 60 fps on the ODroid? Depending on how to slice that up you should be able to transcode 2 or 4 Full HD streams at 30 fps at the same time.

ODroid has no video input at all (the product page suggests getting a USB camera which performs its own compression, because the ODroid could never keep up)

This has to do with bandwidth on USB. Doing 4k screen grabs over USB at 30 or 60 FPS ain't gonna happen. Unless you have a dedicated path to offload the data to the VPU you can't even feed it fast enough to do anything remotely useful.

Ok, probably most users care more about the general-purpose ARM cores and Linux than the VideoCore, but it's just wrong to say that ODroid "has the same cores but faster", when the biggest portion of BCM2837, the VideoCore, is completely absent from the ODroid.

Hardware wise the ODroid is a bargain.Fitness for use is up to each application.Software support... to be hone

Win some lose some. That chip is a bit of a bottleneck for other things (USB, ethernet) and is the reason the Pi has a 1GB memory ceiling - so if you care about the video it's wonderful and if you don't care it's worth using something else if you want to use it for something that hits limits.

A company that's little known but produces massively better hardware than hyped RasPi does deserve some spotlight. As for support for bad hardware, you can return it for a limited time after purchase -- but really, both for RasPi and hardkernel the hardware's cost is low enough compared to shipping costs that it's less hassle to just throw away and buy new. We're not talking about $5000 or more servers here.

Higher Specs look good on paper, but are not nearly as important as stability and well written software. I have the original version that looked amazing next to the pi 2. But it crashes all the time and the only video player that works on it is Kodi.

It seems to me that the barriers to entering the "community" are pretty low. As a baby step the ODroid could have put the connectors and mounting holes in the same place as an Rpi, that would at least have made it possible to use some of the mechanical accessories, like enclosures and maybe even some of the more exotic accessories like GPIO breakout cables.

I don't see any other small form factors getting much traction, it's not as if there are lots of vendors making mobile-itx form factor boards and enclosu

Also, "brick" means that you can't recover it unless you use complicated procedures like unsoldering/soldering chips, flashing through JTAG etc. How is pulling out the SD card and reimaging it akin to "bricking"?

I own a Odroid C1+ I intended to use as a mini network television appliance - basically a home-brew Tablo. I had convinced myself that since it ran a recent-looking version of Ubuntu, and that version supported my USB tuner stick, I was good to go.

In fact, the OS for the C1+ is a weird hybrid of a very old kernel (3.10 IIRC) and somewhat newer, but still oldish, user-space code. For those new to this, the current kernel is 4.4.4, and 3.10 was released in June 2013. This kernel dates f